that faint 'slam,' this time repeated by four, and the 'bouquet' of four shells crumped down almost on top of the support line. The four crashes might have been a signal to the British guns. About a dozen reports thudded out quickly and separately, and then in one terrific blast of sound the whole line broke out in heavy fire. The infantry in the trenches could distinguish the quick-following bangs of the guns directly in line behind them, could separate the vicious swish and rush of the shells passing immediately over their heads. Apart from these, the reports blent in one long throbbing pulse of noise, an indescribable medley of moanings, shrieks, and whistling in the air rent by the passing shells. So ear-filling and confused was the clamour that the first sharp, sudden bursts of the enemy shells over our trenches were taken by the infantry for their own artillery's shells falling short; but a very few moments proved plainly enough that the enemy were replying vigorously to our fire. They had the ranges well marked, too, and huge rents began to show in our parapets, strings of casualties began to trickle back to the dressing stations in a stream that was to flow steady and unbroken for many days and nights. But the enemy defences showed more and quicker signs of damage, especially at the main points, where the massed guns were busy breaching the selected spots. Here the lighter guns were pouring a hurricane of shrapnel on the dense thickets of barbed-wire entanglements piled in loose loops and coils, strung in a criss-cross network between pegs and stakes along the edge of the neutral ground; the howitzers and heavies were pounding and hammering at the parapets and the communication trenches beyond. For half an hour the appalling uproar continued, the solid earth shook to the roar of the guns and the crashing of the shells. By the end of that time both fronts to a depth of hundreds of yards were shrouded in a slow-drifting haze of smoke and dust, through which the flashes of the bursting shell blazed in quick glares of vivid light, and the spots of their falling were marked by gushes of smoke and upflung billowing clouds of thick dust. So far the noise was only and all of guns and shell fire, but now from far out on one of the flanks a new note began to weave itself into the uproar--the sharper crackle and clatter of rifle and machine-gun fire.